HOW STRANGE WE WOULD’VE LOOKED to the first mothers: wild, screaming fish creatures, scaled and boneless. What would they have made of our zigzag bodies curling through the water in a spirally streak? Perhaps it is a blessing that because of their deaths they could never look upon us. They never once had to fret over the strangeness they’d wrought. What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin? First, gray, murky darkness. First, solitude. Each of us is the only one of our kind, for we are spread apart and know not of one another’s existence. We die in droves, foodless.
